Can you be English and non-white? It’s a question that keeps stubbornly resurfacing in our political discourse.

Last weekend, the former prime minister Rishi Sunak gave his view in a column in the Times, arguing that national identity should not be turned into a DNA test. After leaving office, Sunak, the UK’s first prime minister of colour, was subject to claims by a prominent podcaster that he was not English because he was a “brown-skinned Hindu”. Reflecting on this, Sunak described it as a “reverse Tebbit test”: the sociological concept measuring the loyalty of immigrants – and their children – in the UK depending on which cricket team they supported in international matches. “Once we say that this or that person isn’t really English or British because they are not white,” he wrote, “then we are on a very slippery slope. Some people will argue that English is an ethnic identity and British a civic identity. Though if you think those nuances are heard by most people, I fear you are being rather – perhaps even wilfully – naive.”

Sunak is right that this conversation isn’t really about nuanced distinctions between ethnic and civic identities. The questioning of one’s Englishness is deeply insidious, as it is not solely articulated through supposed “legitimate concerns” about the pace of immigration, crimes committed by migrants or ethnic minorities, or anxieties around jobs and access to public services. Instead, it is presented as a question of first principles: whether you are a “good” or “bad” minority, a citizen or non-citizen, your ancestry or skin colour means you will never truly belong. Your claim to belong in this country, and that of your descendants, will always be implicitly lesser than those who could, at least theoretically, trace their ancestry back to Oswald of Northumbria. That idea is deeply uncomfortable for many, rejected both by those who hold progressive views on immigration and community........

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